Look, what's driving this here, people? Budget time in Washington and the fears of the fiscal cliff? Democracy promoters have to justify their huge expenditures now and need a new, leaner theory? The drones-smiths have become impermeable to reason about winning hearts and minds unless they get some "realism"?

I asked Caryl on Twitter what he calls his school of thought then. Neoliberals? (i.e. the opposite of neocons, but with the "neo" -- and hey, somebody has to fit the description of all those rabid Marxists always kvetching about "neoliberal policies," i.e. capitalism, foreign investment, structural adjustment). Pragmatists? Realpolitickers? As we know from Joshua Foust's endless invectives, those other people are always the reactionaries, the neocons, the loons, the liars, the sell-outs. But then, what does he call himself and his friends? The smart people? Surrounded by idiots? Oh, the Registanis?

I thought about trying to write a piece of my own on democracy promotion theory for our time, which I will get to in due course, but I thought it was urgent to write a letter of distress to Christian Caryl about these notions:

Dear Christian,

You were struck by "the self-sacrifice and idealism of figures such as these" and you recognized that these "give the story its lift". Yet you seem to want to abandon this quickly in a rush to realism so that we don't seem too silly spreading viral Kony videos. I would submit, however, that we can face reality, without giving up idealism as you seem to be implying by publishing Sarah Kendzior's piece, which is a tacit endorsement of the scrapping of the Western notion of civil society in democracy work abroad. Sure, when you publish that piece first, not in a "Room to Debate" or round-table kind of framework, it *is* an implicit endorsement or some kind of concession that "this idealism has to go". While publishing Kerry Cosby next somewhat mitigates that misfortune, that article tends to see "civil society" as a series of discrete USAID programs or NGOs formatted in the western grant-recipient style, and seems to relegate all people's movements to "nationalism," never beloved by the Western liberal intelligentsia.

That simply misrepresents what is civic and what is society in these countries, such as it is, and discounts first movements of secular internationalists even in these “nationalist” settings, and also the power of movements that may not be very liberal or organized in Western terms, but still challenge the regimes, in Uzbekistan, i.e. taxi drivers who go on strike or religious believers who form prayer groups in their home despite the brutal consequences. A key reason why so many analysts missed the signs of the Arab Spring *and* the big demonstrations of Russia is that they kept looking to formulas of regime change devised at seminars of grant givers and grant recipients, and didn't take the broader view of various social movements.

I don't understand why people complain so much about how democracy is not going well, quite frankly. Yes, I realize Thomas Carothers has been saying that the winds of democracy are not at our backs for the last 15 years, repeatedly. But in my lifetime, I worked on issues and cases in the Soviet Union for more than ten years before I saw any change or progress in the 1980s -- and there were other people before me who worked then 20 or 40 years -- and of course there have been many reversals in Russia and the other post-Soviet states. You complain about Venezuela, but have you checked into Chile? It's changed, and changed more durably. What about Poland or South Korea? Is it that people are no longer able to go the distance and want a quicker fix because social media makes it an interactive 24/7 story for them? Every one of these case histories you give from the film are in reversal -- but think of what they were years before that and it puts it into perspective.

I think this notion that the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated government is "democratically elected" is part of the problem here. I think we as Americans and our administrations and democracy programs obsess too much with elections, and particularly election day as some kind of alchemy. There is less attention to the institutions and methods that ensure that day-to-day life has democratic *processes* and the rule of law. As you well know there were many stages along the way to this "democratic administration" in Egypt that proved not to be so fair of free.

This is like the old chestnut that Hitler won in democratic elections, i.e. gosh, democracy isn't "all that:". But what kind of political life? What kind of institutional life? What is the nature of that movement coming to power? All this matters tremendously, not just mere "democracy"; democratic procedures matter. That's why when Adbusters says airily that they don't care if their behaviour is bad on the way to the revolution, they'll fix it later, I don't buy it; it matters now whether you can be peaceful and civil and create viable democratic processes -- "the people's mike" and the sectarian-ridden "General Assembly" were not that. If people "vote against democracy," then...the liberal democratic institutions in society are weak and insufficient and ultimately *it is not democracy that produced that undemocratic effect*. There doesn't seem to be any inevitability to liberal democracy as much of the world doesn't have it and doesn't engender massive movements for change.

And you're quite right that the Internet isn't decentralizing these tyrannies because they can just shut them off, and some of the "lovely" examples of what are supposedly to be "decentralized" non-hierarchical movements like Anonymous in fact are highly-rigid and disciplined shock troops in what is in fact a very illiberal and totalitarian-style movement. But it's not over til it's over, and the struggle goes on in some places. I was the first to say that the demonstrations in Russia would not work and were doomed, and that was simply because I could see the opposition didn't have durable and long-term organizations even as good as the nyeformaly era of the 1980s, which led them into the reform of the parliament and other institutions. There were too many grant-suckers and no enough doers. Everyone thought it was great that they had Facebook and could turn out 20,000 people on Bolotnaya with a single post, but then...that was all they had. They didn't have a way to keep connected and keep fighting and focused and most of all, to keep people's livelihoods and support maintained as they became threatened.

In fact, we *are* on the right side of history by supporting liberal institutions and values and we need not be guilty about saying so (this is different than saying "democracy" is the station we permanently disembark at). Why could possibly be wrong with them, Christian? Surely you yourself have witnessed that people in even very profoundly unfree situations still instinctively grope for better processes, and fight unfairness. I recall my colleagues returning from a trip to report on Zimbabwe, where they interviewed some women taking a cart 30 miles to get treatment for cholera for their children, and they were asked what they needed most. Clean water? Medicines? Clinics closer to home? And they answered "better governance" -- despite never having had an NED grant or attended a USAID sponsored workshop -- because the problem with cholera was engineered by a corrupt and despotic government. You know how this works, and yet you shy away from choosing that forever for fear of looking like it's an uncool end of history like Marx or Fukuyama.

But the comments let us know that readers aren't content to be told to shut up and keep asking lots and lots of good questions -- they want to make sure this doesn't happen again, they want to understand its dynamics. As one reader aptly asks, "Where is the journalism"?

And journalism may put the pieces together, and police forensics may trace the relationship from online life to real life but the real place these connections are being made now is in the human heart: even some very avid gamers are starting to say "enough".

I can't help feeling that if Anonymous were on this job, it would all be on Pastebin by now, and because it isn't, maybe Adam was in Anonymous. The NBC News piece is the very first piece to say that Lanza was "conservative" and had beliefs in the "free market" and such. But it's very flimsy evidence for making this statement.

Actually, usually in a person online of his type -- young, nerdy, computer-savvy, etc. -- the belief in the free market goes more with the libertarian viewpoints of the Ron Paul type -- that is really a different political profile than "conservatives" who might have religous beliefs. Anonymous can be revolutionary, anarcho-communist or it can be technolibertarian like Paul -- the two political movements are not that different online.

Michael Mayko has an article up at San Francisco Chronicle that seemed promising, but it was in fact a re-hash of what other "experts" have found. He simply found a different expert to say the same thing -- that maybe you can get destroyed hard-drived fixed:

Electronic and forensics experts say information could be pulled from computers seized from Lanza's Newtown home, even if they were struck with a hammer, as some reports say.

"If he drilled holes into it, that would be a different story," said Mark Morton, a laboratory supervisor in the University of New Haven's electrical engineering department. "It depends on how much the federal government wants to spend. I believe if the federal government wants to recover data, it will get the data."

But he's not the guy doing the forensics -- we don't know who is. Maybe the FBI, maybe some university or corporate consultants in secret with the FBI. As a side note I'll say that getting your hard drive recovered can be a very frustrating and expensive process but also the quotes on the job can be wildly different and the diagnoses wildely different. I've had to go do this job twice -- once having a very savvy specialist who did professional forensic work saying a computer was beyond hope, and another time having one company say they could do it for $950 and another say they could do it for $2000. You sense that they try to get away with what they can. I ended up finding a student to do it for $750. It *is* a painstaking and thankless tack. I discovered from another computer professional that it's basically like taking a needle on an old-fashioned record player and trying to get it to follow a groove enough to play a record, despite having scratches on the album. Isn't it funny with all the fancy modern technology, that underneath is something that frustratingly simple.

Eventually, we'll hear more on this from police, if they talk, but journalists could be doing a lot more with this than they've been doing -- I think the problem is that mainstream journalists don't know where to look when studying the underground like Anonymous, and those journalists at the tech web sites or who specialize in hacker culture like Adrian Chen at Gawker want to make sure that their beloved hacker culture is never, ever associated with something like this -- so they don't probe too deeply. It's like the same problem we saw with probing the reasons for the failure of Orca -- there's a default disdain and affected lack of interest because it would cut close to the bone of the very bastion of nerd identity, the nihilist online culture itself.

But there are some very important signs of how this is cracking -- and it's interesting. Just as the right-wing has had to crumble somewhat in holding so hard and fast to its gun rights notions, and the NRA has been put on the run, so geekdom has had to loosen its grip on its massive denial that violent video games are related to real-life violence.

So the first big defection occurred on the Kotaku, the very popular gaming site. Astoundingly, a gamer and journalist said he was done with violent games -- they sickened him now after Newtown. What was even more extraordinary, this man, named Jeremy Norman, had reported on the Virginia Tech massacre, yet gone right back to violent gaming after that searing experience. Now it's different.

For nearly 30 years I have squashed anthropomorphic mushrooms, cleaved zombies, and eviscerated the avatars of faceless gamers from around the world. I have no interest in any of that now. Not after Friday.

I was in college during Columbine. I remember sitting in my dorm room watching kids, just a few years younger than me, running for their lives as police descended upon their high school. I remember thinking how nightmarish it must have been for all involved—then turning on my N64 for a round of GoldenEye with my hall-mates.

I just don't want to do it anymore. I don't want to disassociate myself, saying it's just a game. I imagine that Cho disassociated himself from the horror he was committing just as we disassociate ourselves when we play "No Russian" on Call of Duty. Thankfully, most of us see the difference, but that doesn't make it any less uncomfortable.

Just one guy isn't a revolution by any stretch, and he was pummeled on the comments for his defection, but then came this, a call for a one-day cease-fire -- a moratorium on violent games on the 7th day after the murders:

Last week, the popular video game blog GamerFitNation called for a
one-day “cease-fire” in an impassioned video that spread though Twitter
with the hashtag #OSCeaseFire. Founder Antwand Pearman was not trying to
vilify video games any more than they had been already, instead, he
told Mashable that he was seeking “a unified form of peace” in the wake
of the tragedy.

If Mashable breaks the silence on this, along with the libertarian techs at WSJ, then you know the subject is getting broken open.

Then there was the consumer angle -- the tech press exists primarily to sell the tech -- the gadgets, the games. It isn't critical of tech itself, ever, except if one form of tech decides to gang up on another, say, Facebook and Instagram on Twitter or vice versa.

But after the Newtown shootings, which claimed the lives of 20 children and seven adults -- including Lanza's mother -- some shoppers are weighing whether it's appropriate to give certain video games to children or young teens this holiday season.

CNN reached out to iReporters and commenters on the site for their thoughts on the issue.

"I have two boys, age 9, that want 'Call of Duty,' " said a CNN commenter using the screen name goldeneagle78, referring to the popular military-shooter game series. "They will NOT be getting it, or any other game that is rated above their age level."

Reader Crysty Harper of Maricopa, Arizona, said she understands that millions play games with no ill effect, but that "for the mentally unstable, these fantasy scenarios are fueling the violence, and being re-enacted in real life."

CNN had to go to its "crowd-sourcing" page called "i-reports" to break out of the omerta or denial around the nexus between video game violence and real violence, but ordinary people -- especially parents -- especially moms -- had no trouble pronouncing their gut feeling on this.

Just like all the people who flocked to the "Mass Effect" fan page on Facebook and poured out their anguish about a warrior game being played by someone they thought was the killed -- who was mistakenly identified by police (not "the media") as Ryan Lanza, in fact the brother of the killer. (And notice we have ZERO journalism on him, the reason his ID was found on his brother, and so on. Maybe someone is working on this, but we can't see it.)

If you read the standard catechism on video game violence, you will realize that mainly, the few academic studies on the subject -- there just aren't enough, in fact -- tend to find no culprits, or are inconclusive, and these get endlessly re-tweeted by angry and exasperated gamerz fearing that someone will take away their pleasures. Nothing like anarchic hedonists clutching a topic to keep literally gunshy journalists away from it -- they fear being politically incorrect, getting flash-mobbed, or worst of all, getting hacked and harassed by the Anonymous mob.

There's a curious fault line again across the left and right on this topic of whether there is a connection. The left doesn't want to see a connection to video games because then free speech might be impacted -- and the role of the state and the role of guns which they'd like to control would not be the focus.

The right speaks of the "folly" of making this connection, like National Review, because of free speech concerns as well, and also because making any sort of institution or corporation or business to blame for anything would remove individual responsibility or imply that more state control of business is needed.

In NFL post-game: an ad for shoot 'em up video game. All for curbing
weapons of war. But shouldn't we also quit marketing murder as a game?

Who is "we"? The socialist committee of comrades that will decide what private companies can sell or not sell, when there isn't a demonstrably widespread link for RL and virtual violence? "We" who want to curb big sports corporations and their advertisers more because marketing bothers us than simulated murder?

It's precisely because usually on both sides, the call for restrictions is about some other issue ("let's hate capitalism and corporations" or "let's hate the religious right and their guns and get their guns away from them to reduce their power" or "let's hate Obama who is a socialist trying to take our guns away from us") that the demand for "scientific proof" becomes very great.

The reality is, there are studies that show violent games desensitize to violence, and then it isn't hard to posit that in the right set of circumstances, someone who has autism, other mental illness conditions, access to guns to make good on his angry impulses, anti-psychotic drugs that in fact might cause him to be more impulsive or violent could then commit a school massacre. In fact, that's exactly what seems to happen, and yet there are a thousand voices parsing each strand of this knot and saying that the formula for it all coming together is so complex that it can never be reproduced in the laboratory of science and therefore we should cease pulling at this or that strand.

It's not that people won't give up their rights so that little children would not be murdered; it's that they don't really believe that it would help or be necessary or valid.

Yet we do know these things are all related by the simple moral process that has at long last begun to move -- it is related when people say "Hold, enough!"

It is related when suddenly, the shock and the nausea of seeing 6-year-olds gunned down en masse -- kids who were going to make gingerbread houses with their moms and dads that afternoon -- pierces the veil and people feel they can't do it anymore.

The moral connection becomes visible even when the scientific connection remained elusive.

Indeed, the scientific connection may remain elusive forever. There many never be any widely accepted peer-reviewed double-blind, replicated study that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that every time you give someone a drug and let them play video games and then have a gun cabinet nearby, they will perform a school shooting.

God knows, as we know from The New Yorker expose, the US military tried to replicate situations just as varied and bizarre to try to figure out how LSD and other drugs might be used in combat, or how soldiers, if they were exposed to chemical warfare, might behave to extricate themselves from combat situations.

While every other gamer and tech forum is busy linking to everything denying the connection, he writes:

I also cannot deny that the most compelling evidence shows that violent video games do cause violence. In the most comprehensive review of evidence (massive meta-analysis) to date [PDF], Iowa State Professor Craig A. Anderson and his colleagues found that their “results suggest that violent video games increase aggressive thoughts, angry feelings, and aggressive behaviors and decrease empathic feelings and prosocial behaviors.”

I fear...This moment when we were turning a corner as a society may have been quashed. We'll see. There were some big admissions here when TechCrunch -- TechCrunch! -- could open the topic critically, and when Kotaku could print a defector's tale (Kotaku!).

And the role of violent video games is going to get looked at lots, lots more than it ever did before, and it will be harder to cover up, because in the place of morality in the individual soul where this counts, some people are beginning to say "no".

After threatening to walk out and simply not participate in a highly flawed Internernational Telecommunications Union (ITU) Internet agreement produced by tyrants, the US ended up losing the manipulated vote at the recent World Conference on International Telecommunications.

When I read it, it reminds me exactly of the World Conference Against Racism at Durban -- the same Cuban machinations with the false flag of human rights; the same active measures by Russia, pretending to remove more draconian drafts and "softening" so that the press lowers their guard, then participating in a bad-faith process.

Everything about it is awful, but the lessons are that the US just hasn't figured out -- like Google -- how to participate in these international processes better. They work it out in some arenas where they have had more skilled negotiators -- like the UN Human Rights Council with Resolution 16/18 on hate speech or the UN General Assembly Third Committee with the Iran resolution.

So they could have done it here, but this would have required many months of work in capitals first; much, much more heavy lifting and calling in of chits to dilute the Cuban poisoned chalice and all the usual UN things. Yes, I realize that they did some of this, but it wasn't enough.

NGOs should make up their minds -- they hate it when Sen. Kyl prevents the Senate from signing the treaty on Disability Rights. They love it when the ITU is foiled and the US is outvoted and a bad treaty is signed. Well, which is it, guys?

Either you are for making all these multilateral processes much, much better, or you are for opting out and invoking sovereignty.

The fact is, China and Russia and Iran already invoke sovereignty and already hobble the Internet on their territories without having even to resort to the ITU as a stalking horse.

So when these bad actors tried to internationalize their bad practices at home, the US simply announced at a certain point that it was walking out -- as they did with the World Conference Against Racism Final Declaration in Durban, which they didn't sign (and there was indeed objectionable language in that declaration that unfairly singled out Israel, and there were other problems).

But I submit that even in Durban, they could have done more to fix what was ultimately a placement problem more than a language problem, and even with this very flawed ITU document, they could have gotten in much, much earlier with the attitude that they would participate and fix, instead of disrupt, grandstand, and then not fix at the last minute because the Europeans would wimp out on them. This happens over and over again, but it's fixable when the US decides to do the following:

o send the A-team to all these UN meetings and permanent positions. They don't do that. Sometimes they do (Susan Rice) but other times they don't.

o get involved a year before the meeting or more and show up at all the little subcommittees in Geneva or other venues and keep hammering at all the little phrases

o insist on process, process, process -- this is how the Cubans and Russians get defeated -- they play the process game and you simply have to get up much earlier in the morning

o show up relentlessly -- no interns in the chair -- competent diplomats who know how to hold up their card in a heartbeat when things start going wrong in the room

o break up the blocs -- the UN is always run by blocs -- the G77, the OIC, and so on. Well, the West has its blocs too -WEOG, JUSCANZ and so on. This work involves both strategy in one's own bloc and bolstering the weak (old Europe and socialist Latin Americans) but it also means reaching out to existing blocs and trying to break them up -- trying to pry out the Botswanas and the South Koreas and the Slovenias that find themselves sometimes voting with bad blocks just because maybe there's a Soviet-era hold-over ambassador still in place, or because they don't have instructions or because nobody has made the arguments to them.

o press -- constantly talk about the bad-faith process -- when the Cubans pull their crap, out it; when the Russians do the fakeroo with the press which they ALWAYS do, be one media cycle ahead of them

o leak to NGOs, they are your best friends

o but hold your cards close sometimes because NGOs have stupid utopian ideas about how to do things and can be unhelpful.

o see anybody -- talk to anybody, talk about anything, you never know

All of this hard work has to be resourced properly, and that's the last thing that is being done now with UN things, but all that happens is that we fall behind, get isolated, and can't influence outcomes.

Here's the thing about the NGOs. They are going to have to give up EFF, NAF, etc. etc. Silicon Valley-driven business models based on piracy and aversion to governance, and face the facts that the Internets are going to be governed on these issues:

o piracy -- and yes, you don't have to put a chill on speech to stop theft and ensure livelihoods online, the rule of law and the courts will ensure this; it's absence of law that enables ICE abuses;

o child pornography -- this is pretty obvious content to spot and it can be eradicated without everyone having a cow about their privacy or their free expression

o guns and illegal drugs -- hey, these should not be sold over the Internet, just like they can't be sold in many localities at all, or at least without regulation.

Well, back to the drawing board. In one sense, sure, it matters not one wit. The US will defy any effort to control its own Internet. But it has aspirations for using the Internet to promote democracy abroad, and this really messes things up.

And let me tack on here in order to recall the role of Awful McLaughlin in this meeting, which consisted of swaggering around and telling everyone he was going to "kneecap" the ITU (!) -- and wound up with the US on its knees in confusion.

McLaughlin is a hypocrite. As Google's chief lobbyist, and then as an
Obama appointee within the White House (Obama broke his pledge not to
hire lobbyists and hired McLaughlin as a favor to big campaign
contributor Google), McLaughlin lobbed for government regulation of the
Internet. The difference: the regulation was to be by the FCC, and was
to be written by, and favor, his employer.

Those regulations,
which the FCC approved two years ago on the winter solstice with
Congress in recess, were written by Google in secret meetings with the
FCC's staff. They imposed so-called "network neutrality" rules which, in
fact, were not neutral at all; among other things, they prohibited
Internet service providers from charging Google for valuable services
which, in all fairness, Google should be paying for.

Google (and
McLaughlin, who no longer works directly for Google but owns lots of
Google stock and has jobs which are funded indirectly by Google) opposes
the ITU because it advocates that ISPs specifically be allowed to
charge large content providers, such as Google, for the resources they
use. Despite the PR, Google's stance -- and McLaughlin's -- have nothing
to do with individual rights or freedoms. They have to do with
maximizing Google's bottom line.

I could note that Sen. Wyden is busy slipping in more winter-solstice "net neutrality" stuff again right now.

The informal deployment of the ex-Googler and ex-White House official still in the Google/WH ambit in other hats, was not a good idea for this meeting. Google leaves itself vulnerable to attack not only because it didn't join the ITU like other companies; McLaughlin and his cronies have just been too nasty and arrogant in this meeting which is not how you can be at the UN if you want to "make friends and influence people".

12/20/2012

I don't know why it is that the British tabs seem to get the stories of what is happening in America even before the American local press in Connecticut or nearby big-city New York press. Maybe because they are more aggressive in getting to sources and getting them to expose their privacy -- so we learn from sources at the Daily Mail that Nancy Lanza, the mother of the Newtown shooter Adam Lanza, was suffering from MS, and was traveling around the country trying to find some sort of reform school or other facility that could take her son (she had the wealth to afford it), fearing she couldn't take care of him any more.

We have stories that the killer took Fanapt, and stories that in fact that is a hoax perpetrated by an Internet troll who shows up during such tragedies pretending to be an uncle of the perpetrator -- even with an admission that in the long list of public shootings, pharmaceuticals nearly always played a role.

We have Michael Moore claiming that Columbine and similar shootings that "it occurs for no other reason" and may be "nothing more" than the drugs.

Yet that's preposterous. The whole reason these kids are even put on the drugs is that their behaviour is impossible to deal with -- parents and schools put them on the drugs not on a lark, but because they are presented with the impossible challenges of both autism spectrum disorder and the violence and nihilism of the Internet culture. This post on The Blaze by "I am Adam's Teacher" sums up the chilling reality -- which will likely be lost on most Internet snarks because of the spelling errors which invite the question of whether this person is really a teacher:

gwhisper2003Posted on December 20, 2012 at 1:14am

I am “Adam Lanza’s Teacher.” When I first got back into teaching in 2000 after five years away I was quite literally stunned at all the behavioral and learning disailities that there were literally “overnight.” It was now acceptable for our society to create a nation of pill popping students that were given these pills by their parents and doctors. Parents allowing these kids on meds and h=behavioral issues languish in virtual worlds immersed in violence. Gee thanks mom and dad. As a teacher I can not begin to tell you how insensitive this is to do to the rest of us that have to try and create a positive safe learning environment for many other children.

I began to see behaviors that were stunning and scary. Students that were medicated seemed to be souless. Their eyes held no glimmer. They often talked of death and violence. They fixated on violent games and gang activities. MAny threatened to kill the families. I might mention here that I worked on an alternative placement campus for students whom could not function on regular school campuses because of thier violent nature.

Many of the parents would ask me for suggestions because these students could maintain thier behaviors and learn and respect me while they were with me. I would tell them it takes dedication, consistency, clear guidelines for what was expected and holding the kids accountable for thier choices.

My own child referred to me as Satan. When he did I knew I was doing something right..

It's clear to me that the right (American Thinker) wants to pin the massacre on drugs because then they don't have to blame guns; the left (Michael Moore and Infowars) who might want to control guns also want to pin massacres on drugs because then they can blame evil capitalism, "big Pharma" which is "bad karma" and do their usual one-two punch -- castigate corporations that make drugs as evil and exploitative, and worship mom and pop marijuana operations as the people's solution.

We get the Guardian earnestly saying what "we know and don't know," and there is still a muddle about whether Nancy Lanza was or was not at the school in a capacity as a volunteer at least, and persistent disclaimers that Adam Lanza was ever a student at Sandy Hook, until someone comes up with the 2003 sweatshirt signed by all the kids supposedly proving he was there in 2002.

So...Police are working with the motive that fearing he was going to be committed to an institution, Lanza shot and killed his mother, destroyed his hard drive, and went to kill children that he thought she cared more about than about him. Even though we don't have enough evidence for this hypothesis.

We're also told that Lanza considered joining the Marines -- he loved guns and war games -- a common move by troubled youths seeking stability, and one applauded by their exhausted caregivers and law-enforcers and judges, who have been known to drop felony charges on some suspects if they say they are going into the armed services to "shape up".

Let me summarize why I think you can make a threat assessment and what criteria to look for -- with an aim to prevention and mitigation, not violation of anyone's civil rights:

o parents and caregivers of children and young people with autism spectrum disorders who become violent -- and they can indeed become violent when they are comorbid with conduct disorder and other psychiatric illnesses -- should be able to seek competent help and be able to confine their children if they are a danger to themselves or others more readily than they currently can. These cases will be a small percentage of cases of Aspergers/autism and no preventing detention or prescreening of all autisim cases will be required and indeed would constitute a violation of civil rights. But those with a history of violent incidents and comorbidity will be definable already and shouldn't be deterred from getting restrictive residential treatment for their kids in institutions just because institutions were abusive in the past, or some institutions today might not be the best therapy.

o parents and caregivers of children and young people with autism spectrum disorders or any child who is being given powerful antipsychotic drugs like Risperdal, Seroquel, Fanapt or others should question the medication and also insist their children be carefully monitored and evaluated, and both the medical profession and society at large should insist on more answers about these drugs.

o parents and caregivers of those with autism spectrum disorders should not let violent movies, violent games, and the Internet in general babysit their difficult kids. They should limit their exposure to these powerful and often addictive cultural influencers and interact more with their children themselves in other ways with other activities.

o parents and others should ensure that neither they nor their children have access to guns.

First, let's not get distracted about whether Asperger's or autism are "mental illnesses" or not -- this is a shorthand widely used by the press and general public and that's okay. These conditions are listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; the DSM is what defines and records mental illness. These conditions are in the DSM; they have not been removed. The removal of the entry on Asperger's, not without its controversy, does not mean that this condition is now pronounced "not a disorder"; of course it is. It is merely moved to another section and merged with "autistic spectrum" where it is believed to be more properly located. See also the NIMH.

As this psychiatrist notes,parents in particular, and young adults involved in advocacy movements, become very angry about what they see as stigmatism, and demand that society change its terminologies; rather than to de-stigmatize mental illness, and particularly the seeking of care for it, some have tried to carve out a special niche for themselves as "not mentally ill". The psychiatrist says the task should be to destigmatize mental illness as a whole, not disprove that autism isn't a mental illness. I agree. I would add, however, that just because mental illness should be de-stigmatized doesn't mean we should cease to tell the truth about it -- it is not all whimsy and catching butterflies; some days it involves a parent holding down their large and violent child clanging from Seroquel and preventing him from eating large handfuls of staples until the ambulance gets there.

WHAT IF THERE IS A CONNECTION TO VIOLENCE?

Second, let me state the remedies I seek -- I think often people debate about these issues with such furious frenzy because they think the solutions people would offer would take away their freedoms or harm their kids. So:

1. People who threaten themselves and others repeatedly and seriously should be able to be placed even against their will in psychiatric confinement for sufficient periods until they are stabilized and have a viable treatment plan. That means those who are not violent and do not threaten themselves or others seriously should not be institutionalized.

2. This long-term confinement should be done with judicial review and a court order, but should not be such a prolonged and difficult process with prejudice against confinement, that persons who need restrictive environments do not get them in a timely manner. So if a violent teen with a history of mental illness is brought to an ER, his parents should get timely help without waiting weeks in Family Court.

3. The confinement should be humane and in institutions with accountability and transparency that regularly receive legislative and/or judicial review and should be open as well as to non-governmental civic review.

4. Those persons who already have custody of others because they have obtained a PINS (person in need of supervision) order or other form of custody or care based on disorderly conduct should be able to obtain psychiatric confinement without having to start the process from scratch each time.

5. There should not be stigma attached to the process of obtaining psychiatric confinement or undergoing psychiatric confinement, any more than there is a stigma attached to be living in a senior citizens' home or assisted living facility. Yet again, the severe behaviour disorders that leads to this confinement should not be neutralized or minimized as somehow not harmful to others or the patient himself, in order to remove the stigma of confinement; it should not be necessary. This is something like the Catholic doctrine of "hate the sin, not the sinner": be truthful about the actual bad behaviour, especially violent disruptive behaviour that a mentally ill person causes and commits against others, and seek to minimize it, but be compassionate and caring to the person himself because of his condition.

6. Psychiatric evaluation and confinement made by police or even with judge's orders are currently insufficient -- they run 24 or 72 hours at the maximum. The observation and treatment period needs to be extended to 30 days or more. More long-term capacity must be returned to the mental health system.

7. Ideally, relatives and care-givers and/or the patients themselves must not be forced to accept medication of the patient as a condition of confinement. To the extent possible, other means of gaining the patient's cooperation should be established without excessive restraint or medication. When patients are given medications, they should be monitored carefully and dosages kept to a minimum while they are watched.

8. In general, medications used on psychiatric patients should be reviewed extensively, particularly when they are used on children, some of very young age. Too many side effects and adverse consequences have occurred due to these medications. Investigations should be made as to the extent to which violent behaviour, including public shootings, are the result of psychiatric medications themselves, rather than the result of insufficient medication and psychiatric treatment.

9. Institutions should become more open to families, with programs like occasional overnight stays, volunteer participation, joint activities, etc. so that they are not isolated. By the same token, a patient put on a non-elopement ward should have to go through step-down, and should not released immediately back to the public without a sufficient caregiving plan merely because medications have stabilized him within a day or two.

10. "Community care" should not mean overcrowded clinics where the mentally ill wait in lines all day to get a cursory blood test or medication dispensed; they should include meaningful and sustained programs for therapy and occupational training, etc. If there aren't the full-fledged community care facilities that can really provide care, the mentally ill should remain in confinement if they are a risk to themselves or others. This shouldn't be so hard to establish all the time.

There may be other ideas for reform, but the objective is clear: the pendulum has to swing back from the extreme it went to when civil rights activists and concerned citizens rightfully sought to close down Willowbrook and similar abusive institutions, but then were unable to ensure that the mentally ill got adequate care in the next 25 years after this period-- leading to subway pushings and school shootings. That's where we are now.

WHAT WOULD BE THE METHODS WE WOULD REJECT IF THERE IS A CONNECTION?

So let me now note the things that I would utterly reject as any response to the shootings in Newtown or elsewhere:

o a national registry of all mental health patients (this is what the Soviet Union had and Russia still has -- let's keep that in mind!)

o special massive screening by either public or private authorities of anyone with Asperger's or any mental health problem to see if they may potentially become violent;

o confinement of anyone with Asperger's if their parents just found them annoying or difficult and needed respite;

o confinement of Asperger's/autism patients for long periods without any court order;

o removal of Asperger's/autism patients from mainstream education in schools because of fears of violence;

o child protective services removing Asperger's/autism patients from their homes in the belief that their parents can't take care of them properly;

o censorship of violent movies and violent video games and confiscation of them from stores or from Internet web shops;

There more be more that worries those who have dug in their heels about this issue, but this should establish the basics here: all human rights for all. Mentally ill have rights; so do families and the members of the community at large. They must be in a balance.

MY EXPERIENCE WITH THESE ISSUES

What is my basis for making these statements?

I am not a doctor or other medical professional; I'm not an academic; I'm just a thoughtful person who happens to have observed these issues at close-hand.

Through various life circumstances I have had the experience of dealing with cases of relatives, friends, and co-workers who have been mentally ill and have had to experience psychiatric confinement and I've also followed such cases through various jobs I had.

For a number of years I worked actively on psychiatric abuse in the Soviet Union, and followed some of the cases both in Russia, and then abroad where some of the people were re-institutionalized.

Critics of Liza Long, including Sarah Kendzior, whose comments I've refuted here, have made much of the fact that she supposedly exposed the privacy of her son on the way to publicizing the anguish her family experienced in dealing with his Asperger's/autism condition.

I don't believe that she has in fact exposed her son's identity, by giving him a fake name and having her own name a very common one, and I don't think it's a valid issue. I personally am not giving details of cases I've witnessed first-hand precisely because of this privacy issue, but I certainly respect any parent who has become so overwhelmed that they have broken the curtain of silence on this topic. More and more people have to speak out; when more and more people speak, the problem of stigmatization which is driving those obsessed with privacy will start to dissipate.

A number of people discussing this issue are tweeting from academic idylls; from suburbia; from affluence; from positions where they don't even have children or don't even work with children or have never even visited any of these institutions or experienced the issue of psychiatric confinement.

Not me. I'm in the heart of the urban grit and am poor and without a lot of resources myself, so I see this issue in ways others may not have had the opportunity.

RUSSIAN AND AMERICAN PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITALS

I've had the experience of being in both Russian and American prisons and psychiatric hospitals and alcoholic and drug clinics, and there's no question which ones are worse: the ones in Russia. While not as many people are thrown in psychiatric hospitals in Russia today for their dissent as they were at the apex of the Soviet abuse of psychiatry, some still are, and the conditions simply are far worse because of the lack of remedies. Some people try to create a moral equivalency between these two situations but they are widely divergent; I don't believe there are dissidents wrongfully incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals in America, although I do believe that there are psychiatric patients with legal problems and cases of mistreatment -- and that's different.

Even so, American psychiatric hospitals can be abusive and are not ideal places for many people to be, especially for childern. One particular problem I've noticed with the facilities in New York and other big cities is that too wide a spread of ages are put together, so that young children and teenagers are mixed, with sometimes abusive results. While some facilities have classrooms where they continue school lessons in restricted settings, they have little else -- i.e. TVs with a few channels, or only one video, and no magazines or books or puzzles. There's a recent for this: violent children throw things at doctors and each other. Everything is bolted down.

I've seen very caring doctors struggling under less than idea circumstances do heroic things; I've also seen med students literally crash their head on the table from sleep deprivation as people were trying to learn about their relatives. I've seen kind and considerate police on duty attempting to help patients and families; I've also seen grossly overweight police who might crush a patient accidently as they struggle with him; I've also seen policewomen with young children at home pulling double shifts to make ends meet nod out in waiting rooms from exhaustion.

In Soviet Russia, they used the "roll-up" -- a wet canvas sheet which was wrapped around the patient and allowed to dry, sometimes then causing him excruciating pain. In New York, police also use a "roll-up" -- a large plastic mat something like an exercise mat which is used to roll up wildly disorderly people, like drunks pissing themselves and flailing their arms all over and trying to hit people. The New York version isn't cruel and inhumane, but it's not pretty, either, and accidents could happen -- one of those heavy and tired policeman could fall on to a patient and suffocate him.

Police are at the front line of mental health care in this country and that fact alone has to be admitted, studied and appreciated way more than it is. This isn't necessarily because of some evil authoritarian and cruel state, but because nobody else wants to deal with unruly and violent people, even when they are only 10 years old. With mothers working, with grandmothers living farther away, with fathers working or having left the family, care is at a premium. Care is what is missing in many people's lives.

Care -- and discipline. Schools long ago denied corporeal punishment -- a good thing -- and they are also denied even any means of restraint or even touching without fear of a lawsuit. Political correctness run amok, combined with a widespread fear of school schootings that lingers and erupts again and again everywhere mean that a young teacher who hears a kid tattle on another kid that he might have a knife, or sees a kid say "I hate you, I want to kill you," might finish the day by dispatching the child to the emergency room under police escort, instead of putting him in detention in an empty class room. That's how it's gotten.

Policemen can be helpful, but they aren't doctors -- and nobody wants to deal with the adults who are 20 and 30 and 60 when they commit mayhem in public, either. A policeman once noted to me casually that if the patient was still ranting about communism when he woke up, he'd remain under maximum security psychiatric confinement. But if he woke up and said, "Oh, I shouldn't have partied so hard," and dropped the communist stuff, he'd go down to Central Booking. What a choice! It turned out the patient had been called a "communist" by a bus driver who decided that every Russian must be one and had broken a window in a rage fit. My advice: go light on the communist stuff with your NYCLU lawyer, too -- they're not going to want to hear it.

CRIMINALIZATION OF BOYHOOD

I've written about the criminalization of boyhood and manhood -- in our day, 50 years ago, kids who fought each other to the point of bloody noses or black eyes were allowed to do so behind the barn and parents stayed out of it as they were too busy at the farm or store. Today, a school-yard scrap might lead to a trip to the ER and administration of powerful psychotropic drugs that take the place of physical restraints principals or parents might of used themselves decades ago.

By the same token, there is powerful denial and rampant political correctness on the issue of more severe violence leading to far more severe bodily injury or even knifing or shooting deaths. In New York's inner city schools, young black and Hispanic males caught up in gang warfare are both the perpetrators and the victims of this violence. Schools bristling with armed police and metal detectors have done little to reduce the actual violence and crime experienced by many.

Twit-wits, often young black men, wrote after Newtown that in America, violent white people are called mentally ill; violent black people are called criminals; and violent Muslims are called terrorists.

That's actually not true, as there are plenty of white children in juvenile hall and plenty of black children in psychiatric hospitals and Muslims in both. I guess you have not seen the depths of sorrow until you have witnessed the howling psychiatric rage tantrum of a 14-year-old black girl with severe opposition defiance disorder and bipolarity addicted to drugs who is visibly pregnant with her stepfather's child. Remember Tender is the Night? New York city psychiatric hospitals are not like those expensive Swiss clinics Scott Fitzgerald wrote about... Even so, what's your plan? Send her back to dysfunctional, drug-addicted Mom or elderly Grandma?

MENTAL ILLNESS SHOULD NOT BE STIGMATIZED BUT NOT MINIMIZED EITHER

Mental illness is heartbreaking. It is chilling. It is especially sorrowful when it comes on over time, in the person's late teens or early 20s. I recall a room mate from college with schizophrenia who once was quirky but functional, but who began cutting off her hair, then screaming out of windows. She called me from the psychiatric hospital and explained that she was Dante's Beatrice. I remember another class mate who sat on a park bench and told me in anguished despair that he had found out his father was gay and was leaving the family. He talked strangely and stiltedly and didn't make sense. Later he wrote to me and asked me to visit him in another state. I agreed and wrote again. He responded that "Sister" had told him that he could not have visitors, and I looked up the return address: he was in a mental hospital.

Once I worked on behalf of a Soviet woman who was involved in dissent and wrongfully put in a psychiatric hospital and mistreated. Eventually, she was permitted to emigrate, and then I found myself drawn into her struggles with social services trying to provide her housing and food in this country. For my troubles, I got a letter from her in the mail one day with a large, dead cockroach -- the grandaddy water bug types. Wrapped around it was a handwritten note with a strange Aesopian comment about murder -- it was too psychological to call the police about, but pretty convincing evidence that the woman was in fact mentally ill.

There's a huge effort to de-stigmatize mental illness, but it some of it trends to the loony, i.e. zealous followers of Thomas Szasz. We are supposed to accept that people who are profoundly chilling, difficult, and even ominous in their behaviour are simply different and we should just accommodate them. No one in these zealous movements ever explains why we can't be accommodated, too.

One of the features of the movement against psychiatric abuse in the Soviet Union, in which I was an active participant, was that the advocates tried to discount any indication that the people on whose behalf they were fighting were in fact mentally ill. Some grew completely adverse to looking at the facts of obvious mental illness. But as I found personally in working on a number of cases, there were people who did require psychiatric treatment, and a very few that even required confinement. Even so, the majority of people put in psychiatric hospitals for dissent, particularly the maximum-security special psychiatric hospitals, should not have been in them.

I find a similar dynamic is occuring with the issue of Asperger's/autism and the nexus of violent video games and guns and other factors we don't know yet that led to the Newtown massacre. There is a wall of denial that there could be any intersection among these conditions and circumstances and that is irrational to me as I will explain.

WHAT IF ADAM LANZA IS CONNECTED TO ASPERGER'S AND VIOLENT VIDEO GAMES?

If we found out definitively that Adam Lanza had Asperger's/autism diagnosis administered by a competent and recognized medical professional; if we found out that he may have co-morbid some other mental illness like depression; if we found out that his playing of violent video games and participation in violent and extreme Internet fora or RP games were factors that led to his killing 27 people, what should we do?

Well, see above for my remedies, and see above for the things I would stay away from. Specifically, it would mean that those parents who have children on the autism spectrum should monitor more closely how much they are allowing their children to be babysat by violent video games and the Internet, and interact with them in person more. They should restrict their exposure to violent media and play with their own children and interactive with them more themselves, or seek help in their care. Families that have violent mentally ill children should be able to get care for them, especially more long-term care that doesn't turf them out of ERs after 24 hours, with powerful psychotropic drugs that may cause worse effects. And no one in such families should have guns in the house. Hey, can we do that much without upsetting your apple-cart?

HERO-PARENTS

Now I want to explain what I think are the reasons for this powerful denial and aggressive pushback: hero-parents.

I've known at least a half dozen hero-parents myself very well, and have seen and read about many more. These are the kind of parents that do everything for their child, once they have a diagnosis -- indeed, they are very aggressive in being advocates for their children in sometimes. I've seen parents give up careers, or completely minimize their normal life for themselves to care for their autistic children. They cart them around to the numerous doctor's and social worker's appointments; they fight with insurance companies; they homeschool them and endlessly devise occupations and activities for them; they struggle to get others to respect and understand them and their children; they try to get their children treated as normal children with mainstreaming; they fight and struggle all the livelong day, sometimes with dramatic results, saving children who had been given up for being profoundly autistic, and enabling them to complete school.

Often, they perform these heroic measures even as their own marriages break up, or they lose their jobs.

Sometimes when I watch these hero-parents, I think that a strange kind of fetal resorption takes place when their child with the "pervasive developmental disorder" is born -- they lose their own lives, they give up their own selves and personalities, and they become utterly, wholely, selflessly devoted to their child, like a diminished twin.

Except not all of them are heroes, and that's why we're even having this converation. The media and the Aspies lobbying groups are so gripped with the hero-parent narrative; they are so focused on the selfless, undying devotion of those bearing the brunt of care, that they can't absorb any other nuances or conflicts in this picture. Liza Long, the mother who wrote about her violent son says she wishes she could throttle him sometimes over his obnoxious repetitive behaviour, and suddenly, she's a bad mother who should be locked up herself.

The hero-parent himself or herself is also the one most vested in reconstructing the narrative of harsh difficulty into one that seems almost joyful or even utopian. The news media is telling us a story of a 20-year-old an Asperberger's patient described as such by a former school official and neighbors, who has taken his troubled single mother's guns and killed her, 6 other adults, and 20 school children. But then in a blog post the father of an 11-year-old autistic child who devotes every possible moment to his son's extensive care angrily tells us not to associate Asperger's with violence -- because his son is cute, and not violent, and can teach us a lot about life.

Could he at least admit that there is a 10-year difference between his son's case and Adam Lanza's case, and maybe things don't turn out for everybody when they grow up? Autism is new; it's about 20 years since we saw the first celebratory books about it and the diagnoses began to increase 1,000 percent.

So now we are being treated to a barrage of statements instructing us to stop characterizing Asperger's as mental illness; stop linking it to violence; stop stigmatizing bad behaviour; and stop doing anything at all except to empathize more and give more donations and buy more inspiring books.

YES, ASPERGER'S PATIENTS DO COMMIT VIOLENCE SOMETIMES

Yet there are cases of persons with Asperger's syndrome and/or autism spectrum disorders who commit violence, such as the cases here, here and here , and acknowledgement of the connection on autism help sites such as this one and in the scientific literature discussed here and here.

I know 20 sets of parents who are likely finding this link between autism and violence to be horrifically acute.

There are three major reasons why I think this linkage *is* occuring -- and that we should not be heeding only those in denial about it but keep an open mind and keep debating and keep researching and admitting connections where see them:

1. Non-hero parents. These parents aren't heroes, because not everyone can be. Not every story is like the Reader's Digest articles and uplifting Good Reads bookshelf. Sometimes the parents have mental illness themselves, as has been discovered with autistic children. Sometimes they develop alcoholism or drug addiction due to the pain and struggle of caring for these children. Sometimes the father or even the mother leaves the family and leaves the other spouse to cope with the child alone, or other relatives end up having to take care of the child as the parents are unable to, or are in jail.

The daily drain of caring for demanding, obnoxious, difficult, and even violent and threatening children is not something that people who have not experienced can really appreciate. Often those non-exposed to mental health issues simply think that the parents are lax in discipline, or should be stricter in their routines. Or they should have vitamins or other exotic therapies. But the parents who are the most unforgiving are the hero-parents -- understandably. They became heroes at great expense to their own lives and selves. They don't want to tolerate the others being slackers -- it gives them a bad name.

2. Comorbidity of Asperger's with other syndromes. One thing that anyone who studies mental illness in children rapidly finds is that they often suffer from multiple diseases. Oppositional defiance disorder can go with bipolarity; bipolarity can also have obsessive compulsive disorder, and so on. These states can be fluid in growing children. Asperger's patients also can have comorbidity of OCD or depression, but worst of all they can have conduct disorder, the most deadly of the disorders to be diagnosed in children and the one with usual nowhere else to go but prison as it has no cure and medication doesn't work very well. The percentage of people with this condition in the population is low; the percentage of Asperger/autism appears to be growing, however, by some accounts by huge exponentials, and CD is growing, too. There might be a very low percentage of individuals who combine both these conditions -- but the place where they may in fact meet is in the school shooter or public shooter.

One place we see Asperger's/autism, war games and computer hacking come together is in some of the cases of the Anonymous figures who have been arrested and sentenced such as Gary McKinnon and Ryan Cleary. They have escaped prison and have been put in some kind of probation and care because they were able to invoke their condition as Asperger's patients. Given the serious nature of McKinnon's deliberate offenses, the many years after his initial arrest when the diagnosis was made in order to forestall extradition to the US, and the media and celebrity circus, I am skeptical.

Those in the Second Life community know about Asperger's because of the high prevalence of Aspies and Aspie groups there, some of them fiercely antagonistic to anyone who sees them as anything but evolved indigo children. The hacker and coder community in general has a higher prevalence of those on the autism spectrum, and they tend to show up in large open source projects like this. Some of them tend to the criminal kind of hacking and griefing; they can be horribly manipulative in covering up their tracks.

THE RED THREAD

Does this mean that all geeks or all Asperger's patients or all Anonymous anarchists are going to be school shooters, or should be locked up, or stigmatized and shunned?

Of course not -- see above for my remedies and for my criteria and for my list of things to avoid.

But some of the Asperger's patients who play violent video games, who hack websites for Anonymous, who script in Second Life are part of a violent, nihilistic and dysfunctional culture that does make it possible for some people to turn to real-life violence. And I believe with all my heart that it's okay to say that; and I believe with all my heart that it's more than fine to express alarm about this.

The figure of Barrett Brown, the drug-addicted and mentally unstable young man who is now in jail on charges of fraud and computer hacking, who got his start in Second Life and who threatened an FBI agent with violent reprisals -- adding to the charges against him -- is one such obvious case. There are others.

For me, there's a red thread that runs from my earliest experiences of Anonymous eight years ago in Second Life and their vicious, violent and threatening harrassment of me for years merely because I reported on them, eventually, through the events of our time, all the way to the massacres in Colorado and Connecticut. That isn't to suggest a conspiracy; it's to demand consciousness.

I thought the task when I first saw this incipient totalitarian-style movement in Second Life was merely to respond to it within that virtual world, either virtually or on blogs. I was even startled to find that it seemed to creep out to real life. Then I found that it was in real-life precisely because it wasn't originating only in Second Life, but only took a concentrated form there, and came from other sources ranging from Silicon Valley cults of open source software and various other psychological cults and war gaming MMORPGs to the Internet fora of 4chan and today Redditt, Fark and others.

Today, there is a little bit of this culture in almost everything these days; there is a lot of it in some places where we have to spend a lot of our online time in particular. When this author talked about the malignancy in American life, she spoke of the acceleration of social media and amplification of the Internet in the last five years, as the shootings have increased. I agree. It's related.

Some older people find explanation for these things in the military-industrial complex, American imperialism, the religious right, oil companies. To them, I say Port Huron is calling, they want their 50-year-old manifesto back, it's in tatters. Others find the explanation in the break-up of the classic family, the diminishment of religion in public and private life; gay rights; women working. To them I say, the future is calling, and you're not in it. And that's why I explain these things another way: it's about the Internet. And the Internet is something we can change.

CULTURE WARS

Some people hate it when you make moral judgements about culture. They want culture to be forever exempt from responsibility for anything negative. They want culture wars to finish: right now! Because 51 percent of them won the elections and the other 49% didn't! They want only "empirical evidence" or "successfully prosecuted cases" or "scientific double-blind studies" to prove something is connected or linked.

But culture is a substrate. It's a milieu. It may not yield up those precise data or cases or studies that the purists (and deniers) demand. And culture isn't just what some groups in society say it has to be, whether hedonists or Puritans; there is civilization, and the rule of law, and human rights.

And this is why I come back to the remedies -- which have to do with admitting problems where they exist and developing reasonable responses. The nexus of autism spectrum, violent video games, and guns does appear, even if rarely -- and with deadly and sorrowful consequences for years to come. When something is that horrible, it must be addressed. The responses need not be punitive which would be counterproductive, but they do need to be effective and the myths have to be punctured.

THE MYTHS

The first myth that has to go is that all parents taking care of autism patients are heroes. They aren't. They can't be. That's why some don't get proper care and deteriorate. Society has to help. And that help has to include longer-term psychiatric confinement.

The second myth is that violent video games and the nihilistic Internet culture have no effect on young people's consciousness, especially those on the autism spectrum; they do. The solution does not have to involve repealing the First Amendment or replacing it with politically-correct codes such as the speech codes on campuses or in workplaces (which in my view have only served to drive the formation of a more violent, misogynist, racist and nihilist Internet culture). The solution does not involve censorship, suppression of sales, confiscation. It involves rather debate, creation of other alternatives, more meaningful and compelling forms of culture for young people.

The third myth is that guns are irrelevant and shouldn't be controlled. I think there is one thing that is for certain, regardless of these debates: people on the autism spectrum should not have access to guns. Those who care for them have to make sure that they don't, and keep them out of their homes and workplaces.

PS More articles making these connections seem to be "allowed" now as the debate has broken open further. Here's one:

This is interesting not only because the editors of this "help" page can admit the connection with violence, many of the parents in the comments describe violent behaviour from their children with Asperberg's as well. To be sure, there are a few who deny it and claim society is stigmatizing their children. Some show signs of being hero-parents, such as the one that said she solved her son's problems by ceasing to make him do anything or fit into anything she, her family, or society needed, but entirely turning herself and her needs over to him and doing what he wanted. Let me suggest that's not a solution for every family or for society in general, either, and I fail to see why it should be. The reality is that extreme solution does not work for all, is not possible for all, and then society suffers the consequence of violence.

I cited links to cases of persons with Asperger's that required even police intervention. There are more:

I have sufficiently indicated there are vast numbers of cases of persons with autism, including Aspberger's who are violent, and some of these cases even led to tragedies. I believe residential treatment, ensuring that this is humane and observers civil rights, respite care for families, and so on as I've outlined are the solution, not denial and insisting that society not "stigmatize" by which they mean tell the truth about what is happening here.

It may be some time before a peer-reviewed scientific study or studies (surely there would have to be more than one) establish this connection. In a climate where there are strong lobbies of parents, physicians and researchers arguing only against stigmatization and suppressing truth-telling, this might be awhile in coming. I have amply established that the question in this headline is "yes". For someone else consumed with worry about "stigmatization" the answer may be no. As I pointed out, none of the remedies I've suggested -- like more attention to keep guns out of the hands of people with this diagnosis and that means making their care-givers more aware and responsible; like removing violent video games and Internet forums from the lives of people with these conditions -- is something that contradicts the goal of "removing stigma" that some might feel takes precedence over any forms of restraint. Indeed, the parents themselves, in comments such as at the link I gave, describe their efforts to minimalize violent TV and games as a strategy for better behavior.

12/19/2012

One of the things that used to drive me crazy in Linguistics class at the University of Toronto in 1975 was the Chomskyan grammar.

My linguistics professor, a young, dapper Canadian who resembled the singer Robert Palmer and drove a motorcycle, would assure us as we tortured ourselves over Chomsky's grammar methods and rules that however wacky his politics were, his linguistics was sound.

Later, I was to sit in political science lectures where the professors would assure us the opposite: his politics were sound, but his linguistics was wacky. I came to believe both were true.

The linguistics method involved taking the mess of a language, as it was transliterated (imperfectly) to us, and then devise rules for why it did what it did. So you'd get the Xhosa language in Africa with its clicks, or Kyrgyz or Turkmen or some language where the rulers had decided to ration the vowels, and struggle to figure out why it went through this or that morphemic change in its various cases or tenses.

So this involved constructing elaborate schemes for how an "o" became an "a" during certain circumstances of stress -- like the "o" in "konechno" in Russia becomes an "a" in Moscow and other regions but doesn't in some -- or how the "ch" in "konechno" becomes more of a "sh" in the St. Petersburg region. World-burning stuff. Except -- as our young professor kept telling us -- we were doing this for a greater cause -- we were going to be able to teach machines to read languages -- computers were just getting started and networking of them was soon to come -- and it would all improve our lives.

So...Remember, there was no Internet then, and computers were literally giant things that took up entire rooms and required punch cards to run -- I had seen them myself in summer jobs at Xerox or Citibank where as a temp worker, I had to be the one to bundle the cards and mail them places or sit and tediously fill out their boxes for various chores they were going to do. I'll never forget the portly older gentleman in suspenders and beards, or or the middle-aged men in buzz-cuts, bow-ties and 1950s eyeglasses who raptuously worked on these machines until well in the wee hours of the night --sometimes overnight -- adapting themselves to these machines that were in fact supposed to make us have things easier.

I always found the Chomsky thing fake -- you had to concoct this entire scaffolding to explain why a language did this or that, and it felt as if you were faking things along the way. Our linguistics professor would praise or chide us depending on whether we came up with "elegant' or "messy" solutions -- I remember I got an "elegant" once merely by accident. This would involve whether you had to have many, many steps and complex ideas to get from, say, "o" to "a" in back formation, or whether you could do it more neatly and economically (that would be better for machines, see).

Linguistics 202 was a big disappointment to me -- they had snuck math in without telling me, and I hated math. I had joined Linguistics 101 enthusiastically, with vague ideas of learning lots of languages, or at least rudimentary forms of some of them and a few well, and going around the world and Doing Good, perhaps at the UN or in business or even as a missionary. I was filled with stories of people who, alternately, innoculated little children by learning the language of remote people suspicious of vaccinations and persuading them to take part in health programs (which they still are deadly suspicious of), or figuring out how to advertise for Coke effectively, or translating the Bible into the language of some indigenous tribe which would then acquire literacy. Those were the narratives of the day imbined from the combination of Life, Atlantic, and the National Geographic which we had in our home. I thought, in other words, that linguistics was about helping humans talk to each other, not helping machines to talk to humans.

As I have mentioned bfore, my father had learned Russian when he was put in immersive language training in the US Army Air Corps and fought in the Korean War, and my mother had been "youth ambassador to Spain" from her city in an international exchange program where she lived with a family for a semester in Zaragoza. Earlier, my grandmother had learned some Greek and Latin by literally sitting and eavesdropping outside the classes of boys, encouraged in this study as girls weren't at the time, and picking up some phrases. Foreign languages were the way in which these people from Irish immigrant families were going to get farther than upstate New York and I am grateful to them for that resolve.

Linguistics 101 at the U of T in those days was taught by an elderly man in a bow-tie and horn-rim glasses who did not spend his days by computers but had spent many years both as a missionary and a scholar. I read Benjamin Whorf at the time and thought linguistics was going to be this lovely literary experience where we would notice how the word "splash" had three consonants and vowel sounds that so perfectly reproduced the sound of water splashing. Our professor explained that there was "descriptive" linguistics and "prescriptive" linguistics. "Descriptive" was the camp he belonged in, and Whorf, and it had to do with learning languages and describing them and leaving it at that. He snarled at those coercive "prescriptives" who were doing damage to the organic mysteries of human language.

But by Linguistics 202 -- to show you how fast events were moving -- the machinists were already prevailing. These two camps warred over who was right, and they warred even over how to describe each other's beliefs, as so happens in ideological wars. One of the problems in trying to discuss this topic now, as you can see from the Wikipedia entry, is that the referents of these terms have now shifted. Now, "prescriptive linguistics" seems to refer to haughty British linguists who are horrified at Americanisms creeping into the King's English, and "descriptive" seems to mean those that let it all hang out and are willing to put words like "LOL" into dictionaries. I'm sure Peter Ludlow would describe this all differently than I am, with utter exasperation, as a professional linguistics professor -- and Chomskyan.

But I'm framing the rough-and-ready problem here: there are theories of human behaviour that try to seek rules for it, and rules for language, which is the expression of human thought, with the aim of making machines be able to interact with humans, and these theories tend to concoct abstract constructions for explaining the rules that don't always make sense, and then there are those who just describe languages and human behaviour as they are and don't attempt to seek patterns that might not be there or might be inexplicable. But then, there is the moral overlay, as the former become coercive and the latter refuse to concede to moral principles and bless "transgressive" or "emergent" behaviour merely because it exists. "There must be no stigmatism," they intone as they devise this or that social policy based on descriptives; the prescribers then seem to devise ever more complex rules to explain this or that thing away they don't like.

A lot more could be said about this, but let me come to the point. I didn't do well in linguistics 202 as it was taught in those days. For one, I missed some classes in the first semester and fell behind. My grandfather was very ill with cancer and I went home to visit him. He had taken us children for candy every Sunday and bought us Easter chicks, and then taught us how to play chess and deliberately lost so we could feel as if we understood how to win. My grandmother was taking care of him alone. So I felt that it was right to visit him in his last weeks. I then returned home again for his funeral.

My solutions grew less elegant and there was no question I was going to "pull a hook" (get a C or worse) in this course, and drag down my entire grade average which otherwise was on track to get a scholarship, which I needed to stay in university. My father was laid off with thousands of other people at Xerox Corporation -- they needed less of the ceramic engineers who worked with their hands on the carrier beads and more of the computer engineers.

So I then decided to do something that we were always discouraged to do at U of T, which had year-long courses with exams at the end, not semester courses with exams at each semester. I decided to drop out of linguistics half way, and find some half-year course -- very rare -- to sustain my grade average. I found a half-year course just in the works of Turgenev, but it was a third-year level. I cajoled the professor into taking me and struggled terribly with some of the work in the original Russian, but managed to earn at least a B. Linguistics as a meta-science was over for me -- except for another half-year course called "The Morphology of the Russian Folk Tale" which couldn't seem to resist having some Chomsky with the literary insights.

Chomsky has remained for me the epitome of machine thinking, and thinking by contrived rules. Curiously, he has a theory of inherency (from where? God? the evolution gods?) to go with the elaborate devised mechanical rules -- children are born with an innate apparatus that makes them learn language in a certain way, instead of as a learned behaviour. (I've always wondered about that, given how Russians never learn to pronounce the sound "th" that American children learn and Americans never learn to pronounce the soft "l" that Russian children learn -- everyone has had the shock of awareness that "even little children speak this difficult language" they are trying to learn.)

This is part of the "nature versus nurture" debate, and it's funny that Chomsky, who is a Marxist-Leninist on so many other questions, rejects the evolutionary biologist's aversion to nativism. But then, Chomsky, as we learn from Wikipedia, hated the Skinner box:

"Skinner's behaviourist idea was strongly attacked by Noam Chomsky in a review article in 1959, calling it "largely mythology" and a "serious delusion".[7] Instead, Chomsky argued for a mathematical approach to language acquisition, based on a study of syntax."

Maybe Skinner was just a bit early with his box -- later, they had the Internet delivered to computer towers to become the Skinner's box.

In any event, this is a longer and more complex discussion than I can do justice to here, but I want to say this:

o There are people who devise rules to explain everything about human nature or human events. Chomsky is one of those for whom every evil in the world traces back to the government of the country he lives in; every evil is a direct result of American imperialism; every evil outside of America refracts from Israel -- and so on. Russia's evil never really enters the equation. China or Iran never enter the equation. America is always the quintessential, innate source of evil from which every other evil emanates. Their rules may be logical; their solutions may even be elegant, but you sense that beyond the contrived construction is an entire world that they just didn't discover or acknowledge, and perhaps a world that couldn't always be expressed in mathematical and mechanical terms.

o There are people who concoct rules to explain mysteries -- conspiracies -- that seem to logically follow from their curious and probing and skeptical thinking and which they construct together, getting farther and farther away from intuition and common sense -- which they began with, questioning the constructions of others.

I remember my one encounter in life with Noam Chomsky. I was invited to speak at a panel at the Socialist Scholar's Conference in the 1980s. My topic was the independent peace and human rights movements of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and how they represented a new kind of social movement for this region and how it was important to be raising human rights and peace issues together. Chomsky was going to talk about what he always talked about, evil American imperialism and its wars. There were two or three other socialists on the panel. I wasn't a socialist, but was accepted as a guest because I came from a liberal human rights organization.

In the audience sat Barack Obama, as was later chronicled, the future two-term first black president of America, but while I remember Cornel West, I don't recall Obama, who wasn't famous then.

I was a little nervous as a young person at the thought that I'd have to debate Chomsky, and face down his anti-Americanism and tacit pro-Sovietism which he usually handled by deflection. So I was surprised to discover, after reading his aggressive articles and books, that he was quiet, withdrawn -- and flat. He didn't make eye contact. He didn't directly engage. In fact, thinking about this now, I wonder if Chomsky wasn't the first famous Asperger's patient, undiagnosed. He had a short haircut and nerd glasses and dressed very "straight" in conservative pants and shirt and sweater, unlike the audience in those days that had a lot of big hair, jeans and long ethnic skirts and batiks.

He didn't debate. He laid out his own theses and simply ignored mine. That was understandable -- I was a nobody by comparison. But given that there was a very big debate then at the time as to whether Western peace movements should take on board the defense of movements like Poland's Solidarity or East European pacifists or Soviet political prisoners like Sakharov (who opposed above-ground nuclear testing, the invasion of Afghanistan, and later opposed "Star Wars"), it was frustrating that he wouldn't lay his cards on the table. Yeah, I get it that he has his own sort of Trotskyist critique of the Soviet Union as "state capitalism" and that feels like criticism. But then, it's not a critique of the communist ideology and communist reality as worse than "American imperialism" at the end of the day, is it.

What am I saying with yet another one of my long, rambling posts with memoirs of my youth and insights of old fights of yesteryear? That the reasons for the Newton shooting are complex, but not that complex; that the solutions for the Newton shooting are complex, but not that complex, that some of those trying to explain solutions away are constructing elegant logic about guns or mental illness that may not fit other situations; that human life is complicated.

Even so, there will still be foreigners who ask in bewilderment, why do Americans say "grosheries" instead of "groseries"? And why do Americans love free speech but love guns just as much? Should they control either the one or the other or both and live in peace?

"Killer lived in windowless lair playing violent video games," screams the sub-head. Interesting, isn't it, that a British tab gets this story, and not the Hartford Courant or the New York Times. Maybe because they don't want to find it.

Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist, and the French terrorist Mohammed
Merah also played Call of Duty. Cue up the inevitable pushback: they also put on their pants one leg at a time and not everyone who puts their pants on one leg at a time is a killer.

Huffpo's analyst then theorizes how more could be discovered about the killer through game chat:

But in the age of cloud computing and multiple Internet-connected devices, authorities have no shortage of ways to follow his online footprints for clues, from acquiring his emails and search history to obtaining his online correspondence while he reportedly played "Call of Duty" on Xbox, experts said.

"Your Internet history is very telling," said Monique Ferraro, an attorney and digital forensics expert. "Even without a hard drive, if he was on the Internet, and most people are, investigators will be able to tell quite a bit about what he was doing, where he was going and what he was thinking

It would only confirm my bias if it turns out that Adam Lanza played CoD or other violent games, but I will note here that this Huffpo story is a bit shakey. Who reported that played CoD? "Experts" said Huffpo and "a plumber" said the Telegraph. But were these experts actually on the case, or are they just speculating? And how was it that a plumber could gather all this information about the habits of his customers when he was ostensibly just focusing on the toilets or sinks? Just to play the devil's advocate.

The autism advocates also ask this sort of question: who is the mental health provider who made the diagnosis that Adam Lanza had Asperger's or was on the autism spectrum? Was it a school nurse, a social worker, a psychiatrist? This hasn't really been established yet, so that enables the autism advocates to discount that Lanza may even have had any mental disability -- yet I think there are enough neighbours and townspeople making this description who actually saw Lanza over the years that it seems reasonable to assert. I think it's also reasonable to assert that he played violent war games . What kid in his demographic doesn't? There's also the plumber's description of the tank posters on the walls of the basement where Lanza lived -- he claimed he lived down in the basement. Yet another story said he lived in two bedrooms upstairs. Still a number of contradictions...

Right now, we're at the level in the story where the press is grasping at any straw, and interviewing neighbours and casual acquaintances and even the barber in town, who said that Lanza did not talk and his mother had to order him around to move in and out of the chair or he could just sit there.

I recall it took quite some time before the psychiatrist who actually treated the Colorado shooter James Holmes came forward and told about all her qualms and efforts to warn people. So we're not there yet on this story. And it was only a week before the Newtown killings, long after the summer killings in Colorado, that we learned that James Holmes psychiatrist refused to order a 72-hour hold on him, when he told her that he fantasized about killing people. And I can imagine why: she was afraid of lawsuits and unwanted attention from first university authorities, then the ACLU, so she backed off, even though the police were willing to arrest him. And there was speculation that this was related to the fact that Holmes was quitting the university anyway and would be out of their hands.

There will be a very thorough scoping in Lanza's case, especially given these sorts of problems in missing the opportunities to confine Holmes -- and authorities will do just those very things that some civil libertarians want to keep them from doing even with a warrant -- and that the CryptoParty would like to eliminate even from Internet altogether:

And if, for example, Lanza used Google for email or Web search, law enforcement officials will likely subpoena the company to gain access to the content of his emails or what sites he visited after conducting a Google search, according to experts. As the recent email scandal involving retired Gen. David Petraeus highlighted, it's very difficult to hide the details of correspondence from law enforcement -- even for the director of the CIA.

What's more, Lanza's reported obsession with "Call of Duty," a first-person shooter video game, may also offer clues. Microsoft's Xbox allows players to collaborate with each other online while playing the game. Such conversations, if they exist, are likely stored in the game console and could provide investigators with information that he sent other players and topics they discussed, Ferraro said.

I suspect email, even if there is an account, will have almost nothing in it but spam. Teenagers do not use email, young people in their early 20s do not use email. They use many other things from AIM to their cell phone text system to tinychat but email is just not their thing. Huffpo and others like Memeburn also note that Lanza does not appear to have any Facebook or Twitter account. That's also typical of this type of person -- young, white male nerd with mad computer skills -- they just don't like the open, popular commercial, girly stuff and the exposure of their privacy. If they have accounts on those services, they will be under an avatar, and so far, with less than a week passing since the atrocity occurred, we don't have a single nickname under which Lanza was known.

I'm not at all a professional or even an amateur expert at these things, and there are people online who could do this 100 times better. But to find Adam Lanza online, you have to go to all those underbelly sites of the Internet, all the raunchy sites like 4chan (but not really, as that has sort of waned lately, the way somethingawful.com come, and the kids go to Reddit now), but also tinychat and Pastebin. What caper of Anonymous hasn't been achieved without Pastebin?

On Pastebin, an anonymous site where you can post anything, originally intended to be used for posting code but often the repository of manifestos and "dox" -- the outing of people's identities -- there's a fairly active discussion around the Newtwon shootings.

Of course, the unfortunate surviving members of the Lanza family -- the brother Ryan and the father Peter -- have all been thoroughly dox'd, with all their private information published. This is sadly too easy to get on the Internet, right down to their cell numbers and the worth of their homes and exact addresses. There's even a Pastebin Possee called "We are the Crows" which has decided to get revenge for these kids' death and are going around drilling for info on everything.

There's a conspiracy theory now that has developed that has some variations that veer off into the totally Internet-wierd, but it usually has to do with the "second shooter" or "the man in the woods" or "the second suspect cuffed" which some news accounts contained in the confused beginning of the story's reporting, but then disappeared. The conspiracies also revolve around the father, Peter, and his business as a tax professional for GE. (Ryan is also in the tax business with Ernst and Young).

The conspiracy story centers on one Richard Novia, a security specialist who was reportedly once an official of the Sandy Hook school responsible for security. I'm wondering why a little elementary school in a sleepy little down in Connecticut even had a security principal, like a big old bad urban high school in New York City will definitely have (i.e. "the safety principal" or "deputy principal"). But maybe they did. This man describes himself in a video published by the AP to have taken Lanza under his wing and befriended him and his friends, such as they were. He was also involved in shepherding the technology club where Lanza was a member, his only activity, and watching out for him because the concern was more than Lanza would be the target of bullying than that he would harm anyone back then.

Novia was reportedly put on suspension after an incident involving pushing of a student. He then goes off and does security consulting and then -- so the conspiracy theorists believe -- is somehow tied to Peter Lanza's business reported in an exotic caper that involves the perennial of right-wing blog conspiracies, the LIBOR investigation (the corruption in the European banks).

Naturally, the left wing blogs have a field day with this wacky stuff and use it once again to pillory the religious right, but elsewhere on Pastebin, all the right questions are asked about this tragedy, and some you may not have thought of, and that's useful. But then the questioners veer off into concocting a script whereby the entire story is staged by actors -- for some nefarious purpose -- perhaps to force the issue on gun control. The Pastebinners cite the fact that the children's dead bodies were left in the school and the parents were not allowed to see them. In the middle of the night, they were taken to a temporary morgue.

I think there is a simple rather than mysterious explanation for this: the authorities wanted to avoid chaos, mass horror, and any destruction of evidence. In order to be able to have all the necessary forensics tests made properly, they would have to make sure the crime scene wasn't contaminated.

I felt bad for the parents that their unexpected gallopping horror was made even more awful by not being able to go immediately to their children to see them. I know from having lost a baby myself -- and others who have been through this say the same thing -- that an important part of grieving is being able to see and hold your child even after they have died. As is known, primates limp around with their dead babies in hand for weeks after their death, still mourning them. It seems to be a natural process, and sadly, these parents, thrust into a nationally-covered atrocity, could not have that basic human need fulfilled. The authorities also likely wanted to make sure that no one accused them of messing up important evidence later, so they tried to be extra careful and organized even under the terrible circumstances. No, I don't think actors performed this horror and then gave photoshopped pictures to the parents -- that's just totally insane. We now have the testimony of the little girl who played dead and who ran out of the school, covered with blood, and other eyewitness reports.

But the "second shooter" conspiracists and the weaving in the story of Peter Novia may have something that could be like crimes of the past. While they don't come out and say it, the Pastebinners seem to be setting the stage for saying that this man with a grudge against the school that fired him, and possibly some failed business dealing or caper with Lanza's father, could have set up Lanza somehow in the shooting. Yet Novia hasn't been questioned by police and he seems to sound sane enough on the video tape. When the two wounded people are able to speak, maybe there will be details that emerge to debunk any conspiracy theory involving Novia, but I'm going to go with "the likeliest explanation is the simplest" and say that if there are reports of surviving school officials who hid from the gunman that there was just the one armed man, if there are reports from kids describing the angry lone gunman who came in their room -- and they ran behind his back out the door -- that it's likely just Lanza.

Keep in mind that Pastebin is very ephemeral, and all those links could be dead by the time you read this, it can be a very hit-and-run sort of place.

12/18/2012

On Sunday night, I went to an old friend's Christmas party, and when I walked in, I suddenly saw a group of New York liberals talking earnestly about the Newtown massacre.

It wasn't exactly a festive topic to be discussing among the Christmas cookies and twinkling tree ornaments and mulled wine on lacquered trays, but it was what everybody wanted to discuss -- earnestly.

One of the people was very prominent; another was well known and somebody I'd debated with on certain issues and didn't speak to me anymore; the other two I didn't know but were likely well known in their fields.

All of these earnest, good middle-aged and elderly people very piously discussed and reinforced each other in several main theses of the "progressive left":

o We must have more gun control -- the NRA is on the run now after the Obama win and we can get them to change -- it's a travesty that assault weapons with multiple rapid-firing rounds are even on the market at all, how can this be? Wal-mart is to blame once again, they even sell the same weapon that killed these kids in their stores! Let's cut 'em off at the knees with naming and shaming campaigns and boycotts!

o We need to get Obama to step up on this and not be contradictory or weak in facing down the right-wing and its gun lobby -- time to pressure him from the left more and get him to face down these conservatives the way we did with their "war on women".

o These violent videos and Internet games are obviously part of the problem, and this is the fault of the gun lobby and also big weapons manufacturers; these companies all make money off selling violence as a sport and as a veritable foreign policy and we must work against the capitalists who purvey this culture.

I listened for a time and came and went and listened some more. I always marvel at how the left and the liberals don't so much debate or probe questions so much as reiterate and reinforce each other, often with little frowns or pushes at the doubtful to bring them into line. And then I decided to speak.

"Yes, you are right, that we will likely have to have more gun control -- why would anyone but a law-enforcer or soldier need a rapid-firing assault weapon of this type? And how is it possible to buy the ammunition for these weapons of mass death over the Internet."

"And yes, we should ask questions about the exposure of our children to these violent video games and online war games in MMORPGs, but this has First Amendment consequences that we would expect progressives to be attentive to."

"So yes -- you may get your way on gun control and even on ratings or consumer boycotts or some response to violent media in video games and movies."

"But in response, YOU will have to give, TOO. You progressives are going to have to give up some of your hard-held, unbudging positions on certain civil rights matters. And the first of these has to do with mental health."

Immediately, the prominent lefty hastened to seem to agree with me, and cited the need for ObamaCare, and more free mental health care and attention to community mental health issues.

"Oh, no," I objected. "I don't mean what Michael Moore is saying. I don't mean free health care -- that's a separate issue. You don't seem to realize that the real issue of mental health care is the ability to institutionalize those who are a danger to themselves and others."

"The pendulum has to swing back from the 1970s when litigation closed down all the insane asylums. We need to bring back institutions. We can make them humane. We can make them accountable."

I described some of the experience I had had with relatives and friends, families coping with these kinds of impossible children and teenagers who became violent or drug addicted and out of control -- a revolving door of people constantly dumped back out on the community with medications that were sometimes causing worse violence and an impossible burden on families.

The little circle of lefties was silent. Nobody answered me. Nobody believed I was right. Nobody wanted to hear it. Everybody wanted to cling to their "guns and religion," if you will -- their view that only guns, and only the religious right were the problem in this massacre, and nothing else. Nothing else.

I withdrew, because nobody wants to start an argument in a Christmas party, but it was upsetting. Later, the prominent one came up to me and asked a few more questions and also demanded to know what I thought the remedy was -- still looking to blame the absence of ObamaCare and the need for ObamaCare as a prevention of school shootings.

I elaborated and explained of the cases I knew of children put in prison or who had become involved in drugs and whose parents were absolutely beside themselves. I've noticed over the years in the schools and even in my church and playground: when the children are little and cute, the solution tends more to counseling, social work and pharmaceuticals. If only little Johnny can be put on Seroquel or Risperdal or Zyprexa or Concerta or whatever all their names are -- and then maybe a bundle of other pills to offset the effects on the heart and stomach that these powerful drugs cause! -- why, the family will get back to normal.

But when they are older and awkward teenagers and young men and women and not so cute anymore, then the solution becomes prison -- "bar therapy," as I once heard a lawyer describe it. Then they are supposed to be not medicated out of their medical illness, but scared out of it by being exposed to violent multiple offenders with shivs.

The fact of the matter is, I explained to the lefty, that by not conceding that people need to be locked up for mental illness and locked up for longer periods, they were only consigning them to the abuses of prison -- a heavy percentage of inmates these days are mentally ill. All that was happening -- like the removal of housing for the homeless -- was that the problem was displacing to the streets and the emergency rooms and leading to subway pushers.

None of this was convincing to the lefty soul, especially my proposal that the typical 24-hour or 48-hour period that judges would give should be extended to 30 days. It's not just a cost issue -- although that's big -- but the horrific idea for the "progressive" mind that people would lose their freedom for all that time, merely for oh, dressing up Goth, listening to heavy metal, "Interneting while Muslim", playing violent war games.

But that's not what you lock up people for, and you couldn't get a judge to take a case like that or even get a PINS on that basis from Family Court.

What I'm saying is when you have a child or teenager or young adult who becomes violent and threatening and unmanageable, you have to have an institution that can provide a restrictive setting for them. And that *is* what is going to have to happen, in addition to gun control or social limitation (not legal limitation) of violent media.

Seeing my interlocutor was still unconvinced -- there just wasn't a "progressive" angle here especially for prime-time -- I tried once more:

"You're for human rights. You're for being humane. You have covered all these topics of X, Y, Z on the issues of inhumanity. Can't you see that it is inhumane to force families to care for children like this and it is inhumane to make society bear the brunt of the failure of that inadequate family care?"

There is a concerted lobby now trying to disconnect the connection between this massacre and autism. Sadly, I know of a likely 20 sets of experts who aren't so convinced anymore. It's 2012. Not only did the teen from "I Never Promised You a Rose Garden" grow up long ago; now the cute kids from numerous endearing and heart-warming stories of hero-parents caring for autistic offspring are growing up to. We're out of the 1990s, when the awareness began to boom about autism, the numbers of diagnoses spiralled, and campaigns began on issues like vaccination or foods. A typical autism self-help manual tells parents to limit TV and game time for their autistic youth.

What happens when the kid is in fact turned over to the Internet and games to be babysat because parents can't cope any more? What happens when they get worse?

It's going to take a concerted effort to get the gun lobbyists to change, and I imagine the left -- which gets all First Amendment on some things but not others -- will have little impact on the video gaming lobby, despite their effort to try to tie it ideologically to the military-industrial complex.

But what also has to be done is for the left to move on its sacred cow of freedom for the mentally ill to act out their violent impulses without restraint in the name of protecting civil liberties. We all know that the "community health care" concept is completely in tatters and never functioned as they believed for most cases. Shouldn't we ask where the "Willowbrook Class" is today?

Geraldo Rivera first became famous for crusading against Willowbrook, an abusive institution in New Jersey where 6,000 inmates suffered sometimes unspeakable torture and mistreatment, and where even some bodies were buried on the campus. It was the target of numerous lawsuits and press denunciations starting in about 1975, which finally culminated in its closure in 1987. I followed all this at the time and had little inkling that what I was applauding then along with other human rights activists could become an entirely different set of problems 20 or 25 years later.

Now we need a place with 6,000 beds in New Jersey (it has since been turned into a college campus and other facilities) -- where we can put not only people before they turn into subway pushers and shooters -- when their families or police can't cope with them on the street -- but where the drug addicted teens and the self-harmers can go for 30 days, not 24 hours. We can make it humane. In the age of social media and transparency, this can be done. Families can be involved more closely with the care of their loved ones. I will have more to say in response to some comments on past posts soon.

"If he visited certain websites, they are going to glean whatever
information they can from that and see what it means," said the source,
who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to
discuss the investigation publicly. "Does he have friends he
communicates with online? Was there a fight with somebody?"

The source also indicated some working hypotheses of the police:

"You don't know if this kid was put up to this by somebody else," the
source said. "You don't know if there was a conspiracy of sorts. You
don't know if there wasn't somebody who wasn't goading this kid on."

So most importantly, this law enforcer was curious and kept an open mind -- and seems to indicate that he was aware that there's already a tidal wave of political correctness, where a concerted autism lobby and as well as the pro-gaming lobby and their Internet fanboyz and the very voluble and high-traffic tech press were already working overtime to make sure that no one ever wound up implicating them in any way, or restricting any of their freedoms over association with this tragedy. He said:

"Has he been seeing a child psychologist throughout his lifetime? Was he
on medication?" the law enforcement source said. "These are a zillion
logical who, what, whey, why, where questions that need to be answered.
They need to be asked without any fear of any stigmatism … and you can't
be politically correct in asking those questions."

No, you can't.

Fear of stigmatism is what the various lobbies hate experiencing, and understandably, if there is any kind of prejudicial profiling. But this cuts another way, too: there is fear of getting to the truth because doing so may stigmatize something and there will be a lot of resistance to that.

Today, of course, the investigation has advanced, and now we're being told briskly by the tech press (and probably with great relief) that we "may never know" what was ever on Lanza's hard drive and that it may be impossible to reconstruct forensically because Lanza, on the day he murdered his mother and 25 other people, even while ostensibly mentally ill or in a rage, he still had the foresight to smash his hard drive. It may be unrecoverable.

Of course, the forensics will call the Internet Service Provider, and try to get email, and social media and all the rest. So far, nobody has come up with any avatar names or handles of Adam Lanza. If his brother or anyone else knows, they aren't talking. At that raucous Internet forum where the kids talk obsessively about shooting and guns and popular culture, a particularly disliked mod had gone missing and some thought might be him. Now, he has shown up again. Or at least, somebody has shown up again using that account.The horrid comments continue, creating the climate of nihilism and hate...

And there might be forums all over in the geeky netherworld of IRC channels and pop-up PHP forums and Pastebins and all the rest. Somewhere, there are some people asking where D3dL& C@D^K has gone because he's been missing, and seemed to be just like the killer....

"They're going to try to find a reason why...he went from fanaticizing about this to doing it," said Marc Rogers, chair of the Cyber Forensics Program in the Department of Computer and Information Technology at Purdue University. "Were there any early indications that he was getting ready to act these fantasies out? In some cases there are and in some there aren't."

Lanza's rampage was likely done for "maximum media impact," Rogers said, so investigators will also be looking for a manifesto or some other statement the 20-year-old may have left on his computer or communicated to someone electronically.

Of course, even if this killer organized a tinny Anonymous-style Youtube incoherently describing his thoughts about accelerating the Mayan Calendar and revenge on kids who picked on him in first grade by killing their counterparts today, there will be a sturdy bastion of those who claim, as they do for James Holmes, the Colorado killer, that he just played Guitar Hero on line -- no violent games here, m'am, we're just good kids.

Why is it that I feel as if I already know Adam Lanza, and you do, too? Because you feel as if it could be the story -- even if the outcome is very rare -- of so many nasty nerds online. Maybe Adam Lanza was an altruistic furry with a free sandbox in Second Life, or the most reliable team player in the World of Warcraft guild. But maybe he clicked on and shared and liked all the ugly and stupid memes and snickered like Beavis and Butthead.

Of course, there's a striking resemblance between Adam Lanza and Tizzers Foxchase, not only in RL but in the feel of "psychotic" that Tizzers emanates with all his obsessive griefing and harassment. But even I wouldn't figure Tizzers -- as bad as he and his noxious little friends are -- as school shooters even remotely. Griefers online and those steeped in the awful 4chan culture may talk sarcastically and cynically about massacres and other "something awful" sort of stuff, but that doesn't mean they are likely to take it off line.

Even so, let me put it this way: if ever Tizzers biggest friends and companions like Alyx Stoklitsky or Joanna Falmer (who may be him, too) or Yeehaw Ragu or Korpov Korpov or whoever would hear suddenly that Tizzers was arrested in connection with a mall or school shooting, they would say they were not surprised. Everyone knows they would say that. The readiness with which the members of that forum jumped nervously to the conclusion that their nasty mod was the shooter lets us know that.

The person incessantly harassing and griefing me in Second Life for more than four years, including with grisly and very creepy RL effigies showing me dead and so on, may not be the kind of person who would shoot schoolkids.

But he is the kind of person who helps create the substrate of culture some other lowlife would swim in who *would* be capable. That's just it. They do indeed egg each other on as a ritual and a rite of passage, and perhaps even this is the result.

I suppose the police are looking at any connections between the student planning a shooting the exact same day who was arrested in Oklahoma, or perhaps they are scouring everything from gun forums where people chat about their "man card" renewed -- the Bushmaster. Or just those Redditt and 4chan type fora where people may have obsessively talked about the Colorado shooting, and then among them was Adam who turns out to be a copycatter.

Why should police bother with all this when the shooter has already killed himself and his mother and the school officials who might know something? Because there might be more than one of them...There's the story of the arrest of someone in the woods which has dropped out of the news and has become great fodder for conspiracists, who have worked themselves now into a frenzy where even the Rothschilds and the Trilateral Commission if not the Zionists have cooked up these school shootings to...take over banks...or something. I think the reason it dropped out is likely that the person in the woods was just one of the people escaping or a parent looking for their kid, and it's nothing.

But we still don't know what Ryan Lanza has told police -- no leaks there -- and the reason why he didn't see his brother for two years, yet he had stolen his ID. And "progressive" publications like Salon are making sure that no one ever asks any awkward questions -- and gets told they are politically-incorrect and harming someone's privacy if they do. Matt Bors at Salon joins other pious types like Poynter acting as if some horrible privacy-outing crime was commited because for a day, people thought Ryan Lanza was the shooter -- because, duh, his ID was found on his brother. You would think there was no relationship at all to the case, so indignant do some social media pearl-clutchers get. Most media or blogs (including mine) were in fact careful to say that they hadn't confirmed the identity, but here's what *police said* (it was POLICE who made this ID covered by AP and other wire services that sent the "social media hunters" to hunting).

Yet for all the intense scrutiny, and all the amateur sleuths out there combing Google and social media. we don't know anything much more than the fact that Adam Lanza was a member of his school's technology club -- apparently because adults basically pushed him into it to give him some kind of activity -- and that one friend of his mother's described him as a practicing vegan because he had a philosophy that he didn't want to hurt animals. That's going to surprise many people and be fodder for many a comment, but it doesn't surprise me, because the PETA mania, in putting people second after animals, already reveals their "end justifies the means" concept and their contempt for humanity that is common to totalitarian belief systems like communism and fascism.

And if Lanza developed a set of beliefs like that, he got them from the Internet. What else did he get from the Internet? What groups was he in or pages did he like -- although he wasn't on Facebook and was probably a CryptoParty kid hiding himself online even as he moved in there.

Interesting, I re-confirmed recently with a Norwegian that the killer Breivik was not found to actually have any organization, and that it is believed that he made it up. It was called the European Defense League or something similar, and had the Knights Templar as a symbol -- there's a 1,000 page manifesto to go with the loony hatred and conspiracy theories. Remember when some "progressives" thought that because Pamela Heller, the Atlas Shrugs blogger obsessed with Islam, and other American right-wing bloggers were mentioned in this manifesto a few times, that meant that they were somehow implicated in the shooting? That was nuts, as there was no connection and the Norwegian authorities never claimed one -- and everyone from Putin to Jesus Christ is mentioned in the manifesto, which has a lot of cut-and-paste and brainy incoherence like all conspiratorial stuff.

For the computer genius Lanza, there might be a manifesto still to appear, like the Unabomber or Breivik, or maybe only a Youtube channel showing some conspiracy beliefs as for Jared Loughner who shot Congresswoman Giffords, but there might be nothing at all. Or nothing that is coherent.

But we're told to focus on gun control and mental health only as a function of free medical care, and not ask any other questions -- by the autism lobby and gaming lobby, of course.

Even so, one expert wants us to keep an open mind:

Nor should the public be shy
about discussing whatever is learned about Lanza's life and what
prompted him to act, forensic psychologist Kris Mohandie told CNN.

"The opportunity is nearly always there to discover and disrupt," he said.

Dr. Mohandie said warning signs
can include self destructiveness, hopelessness, desperation, interest in
other mass shooters and a dysfunctional interest in weaponry.

Adam Lanza attended LAN parties via his technology club notes the Internet Post, yet none of the people interviewed have mentioned any particilar game or MMORPG. In fact, you wonder, if one surfaces in connection to this case, like "Mass Effect" appeared on Ryan Lanza's Facebook page, that there will be a wall of deniers to discount any possible influence of this or any MMORPG or video game on the killer's consciousness.

Blogger ajfloyd writes:

Many articles, including witnesses’ accounts, have described Adam
Lanza’s advanced skills with computers, a skill-level common with
Asperger’s sufferers. Indeed, many computer hackers have Asperger’s
syndrone — Adrian Lamo, Ryan Cleary, and Gary McKinnon, for example. And
yet, Adam Lanza ‘left no online footprint?’

In fact, Gary McKinnon structured his legal defense on hacking charges on his condition as anAsperger's patient; Ryan Clear is also described in this fashion.

The lack of an online footprint for Adam Lanza -- although it has only been less than a week since this atrocity -- has already proven fodder for conspiracy news sites which have reprinted the TIP story on numerous other sites -- either authorities scrubbed it after bagging it, or he himself knew how not to leave a trace -- a skill, by the way, that groups like the CryptoParty are increasingly spreading and demanding in their counterculture.

It's easy to say in retrospect that "all the signs were there" -- a neighbour recalling that Lanza tantrumed when he babysat him, and the tech club member saying they were the nerdiest in town. Yet lots of people have those signs and not only don't commit mass murder, but don't even kick their dogs. Even so, there is nothing wrong with looking for how patterns might fit together to try to figure out how this tragedy could be prevented in the future. The same geeks who insist on "science" and "impartiality" for everything else, and get into a rage fit about Mike Huckabee don't want to apply impartial science to this if it implicates any of them.

So, Kevin Systrom hasn't taken my advice (yet) on creating a new interface on Instagram to enable us all to buy and sell our photos to each other and to companies interested in paying for them -- and have Instagram take a cut of the proceeds and/or sell microcurrencies for micropayments. You know, like Second Life!

Instead, he's rolling out a TOS with the big grab that Facebook used to make of our content -- until there was a huge revolt and they changed the TOS, remember?

Linden Lab, makers of Second Life also makes you sign a TOS that grabs your content for perpetually paid-up forever -- to use in their ads without compensation. But you still retain the intellectual property to your content and can buy and sell it. And the reason Linden Lab has been profitable, along with its users in the content, design, scripting and server rental businesses, is that it doesn't rely only on you giving up all rights to your content to make a buck occasionally with other companies, it engineers digital rights management into the user-generated content and takes a cut on the web marketplace and the currency sales and of course on the cash-out.

Instagram could be doing all this as I explained, with my amended dashboard that Anil Dash couldn't see his way clear to making, either.

But here's what's even more awful than Instagram, which at the end of the day, is just putting in the standard boilerplate suggested by California lawyers to social media platforms since time immemorial.

The supine and craven tech press is cheer-leading this big grab instead of criticizing it. At least Anil Dash made a techocommunist criticism of the big grab, hoping to enable "Creative Communism" to flourish to take care of the rights issue and keep it out of the big, rich mean capitalist company's hands. But of course, that's awful -- why can't we have Creative Commerce and get paid!

Joe Brown at Gizmodo is no better -- he tells Instagram to go ahead and take his photos for free to sell to big corporations -- and suggests some they could take. What a wuss.

Cord Jefferson is no better -- he unquestioningly reports the TOS grab without asking why, indeed, we can't have pay buttons. To be sure, he admits that it isn't as bad as portrayed as there is still language about owning your own IP, but there's no curiosity, to breadth of vision about how it could be profitable for user and company.

I'm starting to feel as if user-generated commerce on the web is like some strange discredited theory like vaccinations cause autism or vitamins can cure it. How did this happen?